But Abbot left him no time to brood. One night, when Titus was showing Shimon and the night shift what Abbot had accomplished that day, Abbot returned to the lab on the pretext of having forgotten his Varian. Titus rose from his crouched position beside Shimon, telling the Israeli, “Go ahead and check that one out. I’ll be right back.”

Abbot turned from his desk with the Varian held in his right hand. “Putting in overtime, I see. Checking my work?”

“Should I have to?”

Pacing a bit aside, Abbot cloaked his words. With an air of embarrassment, he confessed, “I’m not playing games with you. I really want your computer fixed so you can verify our legends. I didn’t mean to do so much damage, and I didn’t know you lost your spare catalogue at Quito. I’m just trying to make up for a small blunder. We’re both really on the same side, you know.”

“Are we?” If Abbot was telling the truth, then Abbot had made an error, and so had the Tourists. As formidable as they were, they were not invincible. He had to cling to that. Cloaking his own words, he asked, “I suppose you’re ready to give up on implanting your transmitter then?”

“Of course not. And all your various secretive activities are only making my job more dangerous. Neither of us want the humans to discover us before the luren arrive. It would be better if you’d stop skulking about so clumsily.”

Titus could not take offense. He was clumsy. But how much did Abbot really know? “Skulking about where?”

“Well, the ship, for one place. Don’t you realize what a mess you made of the business of the dormant luren?”

Abbot reacted to the dismay that disrupted Titus’s heavy cloaking by wrapping his Influence around Titus, shielding his shock from human notice. “You didn’t know. ?”

Titus had cherished the knowledge that Abbot had not known he was hiding in the sleeper’s chamber, observing.

Abbot moved a bit closer. “Listen. We can’t afford another botched up job like that one. Thanks to you, they’ve moved the dormant one into the biomed dome and redoubled the security. What if he wakens where we can’t get to him?”

Titus gulped. He knew what happened when an Earth luren wakened without luren help. He had hunted down such feral monstrosities. They were the source of the worst of the vampire superstitions.

“They’ll probably vivisect him soon,” Abbot went on grimly. “I can’t imagine how we can rescue him now. If I were you, I’d feel like a murderer.”

“He’s not dead yet-”

“And don’t assume you’re in the clear. They’re combing all records looking for whoever might have broken into that chamber. We were both on Kylyd, though I was there before you. They can’t prove I was there, but I can’t prove I was elsewhere. Can you? Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“How can you be so sure it was me?” His voice shook. When he’d returned to his apartment that day, he’d found a message from Inea on his vidcom. She had triggered the emergency alarm trying to wake him, so she knew he hadn’t been home.

Worse yet was the idea of the sleeper coming to on the operating table with a dozen human medics leaning over him. In the ravening hunger of reawakening, he would surely kill most of them before he was subdued.

“Who else could have figured out the door latch? The only others who can work it are two anthropologists and two Brink’s men. They had clearance. They knew the alarm system. They trusted the alien lock to hold against any human. They never figured on another luren who could work the latch.”

He didn’t know I was watching him! The relief that flooded through Titus almost undid him. “I’ve learned to avoid the security alarms now. Don’t worry. I won’t set them off again.” But I didn’t figure out the lock. His hands had worked the alien mechanism by accident. Quick, change the subject. “You say it’s called Kaileed?”

“I think it’s a type of bird. A scavenger. When I was young, it was used as an insult. There’s so much you didn’t give me time to teach you. If you had, you’d understand and help me with this transmitter.”

“What is there to understand except that humans have no defense against luren, and luren have no reason to regard humans as equals? Inviting luren here would just be handing over our human families to slavery-or worse.”

“You don’t know that. We’re here. The very fact that we’re luren, too, will protect Earth. If we call in the authorities, we’ll have proprietary rights over Earth. If we just sit and wait, we won’t get any rights.”

“We don’t know that Law still holds, or that human-luren hybrids would be legally luren-able to own property.” The implications of human-luren cross-breeding had not escaped Titus. They had to be genetically linked, to be races of the same species. But would that make a difference to luren? “Laws can change, you know.”

“The Law of Blood is ancient beyond human reckoning. There’s no reason to suppose it’s changed in principle. Our time sense has changed with our shortened lives, you know. We haven’t been exiled so awfully long.”

“We don’t know how long the ship that brought our ancestors was out of touch with luren civilization before it arrived here. We don’t know the parameters of the space drive they used-the time dilation. For that matter, we don’t know what sort of drive Kylyd has! Neither ship is a generation ship or a sleeper ship, but they can’t be instantaneous.”

“There are a lot of old tales I only half remember. Titus, there could be virtually instantaneous travel by now, and there may be more than just luren in the galaxy. There could be a galactic civilization with inter-species politics. The Blood may need us-and Earth-as much as we need them.”

“And you want rescue to come in your lifetime. I can understand that. But give the humans time to study Kylyd and they’ll meet luren as equals. Without your signal, it could take a couple of centuries for them to get here. By then-”

“-you’ll still be young, and you’ll have to watch the extinction of Earth’s luren. Think what you’re saying!” Abbot’s intensity was born of true conviction. “We’re already losing our heritage. Little things, like the fact that kylyd is the name of a scavenger bird, get lost each generation, and big things do too. You Residents call yourselves vampires, not luren. You think of humans as your families, not a convenient link in the food chain. In a few centuries, there won’t be any recognizable luren on Earth to be rescued.”

“Are you so sure we’d be recognized now? I saw the dormant one. Would he think he looked anything like us?”

“Have you seen the way humans look at him? Do you doubt that if they knew us, they’d turn on us? Son, don’t you know how difficult it was to get you and me into this Project? With today’s computer records and photographs, life on Earth isn’t what it was when I was your age. It’s becoming harder to forge new identities to cover our failure to age. Manipulation of popular or even government opinion is nearly impossible. Soon we’ll be rediscovered and humans will erupt in madness to devour us all. Even Residents who consider themselves humans and live on that synthetic syrup you call blood, won’t be safe.

Titus, it wouldn’t take much to wipe us out. Humans know our vulnerabilities. We need the help of The Blood.“

He might be right. He just might be. While Titus groped for reply, someone called, “Dr. Shiddehara! I have a tracing now! look at this!”

“I’ll be right there!” called Titus.

He buried himself in the work, frightened by Abbot’s ability to undermine his convictions. He preferred to deal with particle storms in space, gravity lenses, galactic fields, or something really simple, like the origin of time. Espionage wasn’t his game.

Late that night, he woke with a new resolve. To counter Abbot, he’d have to use Influence, and he knew just where it would be most effective.

Dressing in a black Glynnis gym suit and his Suchoff moon shoes, he threw a towel about his neck and went to the gym. He had been unable to crack the project’s security codes and get into the files. But he had discovered the duty rosters for the Brink’s personnel, and there was one charming young woman, Suzy Langton, who would be in the gym now. It shouldn’t be difficult to get the codes from her.